hmm...it did not work, i use Korn shell and -n is not an option. when i did try it with -n ..it still did not work, my second column still had duplicate entries (numbers). Anything else i can try folks?

So if you have two lines "Alpha Zero" and "Beta Zero", and sort -u -k 2,2, your output will contain just one of those lines (randomly chosen). There will only be one line in the output with field 2 of "Zero", and one of your (non-unique) data lines will be omitted.

This might be what you wanted, but it was a surprise to me. It is very different to sort -k 2,2 | uniq , which I assumed it was a shortcut for.